The difference between lying and bullshit, wrote the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, is less a question of a statement’s relation to the truth than of the motivation of the person making it. A liar wants his audience to believe what he says; a bullshitter doesn’t care, as long as he gets what he wants.

I thought about that this week after watching the documentary Weiner, a chronicle of the downfall of Anthony Weiner, He was a favourite in the race to become New York mayor until, in 2013, his political career ended when it transpired that he had not, in fact, stopped sending pictures of his penis to women on the internet. The first time this happened, in 2011, Weiner resigned from Congress and the public forgave him. The second time, they did not.

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The documentary is, at times, almost too excruciating to watch. It is testament either to Weiner’s narcissism or to a desperate need on his part to win back favour that he allows the cameras into every stage of his campaign’s meltdown, including some agonising exchanges with Huma Abedin, his wife and an aide to Hillary Clinton.

Abedin is the hero of the piece, mortified, dignified, wanting simultaneously to help her husband and to kill him. She can hardly speak in some scenes, she is so shocked. In others, she looks with almost tender bafflement at the disastrousness of her husband, a man who, one suspects, has a sense of himself as more sinned against than sinning.

At one point, after flipping the finger at some journalists, Weiner marvels at his own ability to “fuck up things”. There is a measure of delusion to the man – he wonders whether, had the scandal reignited earlier on in the campaign, he might have had time to turn things around.

But he is also a shrewd analyst of what is “wrong” with politicians, who by their very nature get a thrill from superficially connecting with strangers, something he dimly links to his sexual incontinence.

One comes away with the sense of Weiner as someone who desperately cares what people think. He also confesses when caught – and as such is of a less dangerous stripe than Donald Trump, the consummate bullshitter. It says something about the current political landscape in the US that, compared with the presumptive Republican nominee, a guy who sends dick pics and then lies about it seems like a rather touching exemplar of human frailty.

Author Nina Bawden was an Oxford contemporary of Margaret Thatcher. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

The icy sanity of Thatcher

In the midst of this madness, I find myself turning to what a friend calls the “icy sanity” of the vintage female British novelist. Rumer Godden is a good restorative cure: all that pull-your-socks-up moral clarity. Penelope Lively has a similar effect, as does Nina Bawden, whose memoir In My Own Time is a wonderful account of the late novelist’s life. She recalls meeting Margaret Thatcher (then Roberts) when both were students at Oxford in the 1940s and trying to persuade her to join the Labour club. The future Iron Lady smiled condescendingly and conceded that, while Labour was “more fashionable” than the Conservatives, she considered herself more likely to get ahead among the stuffy old Tories.

Jude the genius?

The depiction of famous writers on screen never seems quite to work out. Genius, a forthcoming movie about Thomas Wolfe in which Guy Pearce plays F Scott Fitzgerald, has Dominic West as Hemingway and Colin Firth as Wolfe’s long-suffering editor. Wolfe is played by Jude Law, unpromising casting given the title. In art as in politics, there are limits to what an audience will believe.